Wednesday, August 27, 2008

When twittering, or otherwise posting a URL online, putting the http://www prefix on the web address will automatically be recognized as a URL and be made a link by various systems (e.g., Google's spiders, twitter's web interface, tweetie, etc.).

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Let the user start the video or audio on a page, or risk losing visitors. A notable exception is if the page in question exists solely to let people watch the video, like YouTube's pages for individual videos. The are other places to use autoplay well, but use it carefully. Taumata's twitter sums up the why:

If your site has music or video that autoplays (especially when it's way at the bottom or otherwise hidden) I will never come back.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

As Mashable points out, EA has successfully navigated what could become a negative demerit amongst the hardcore fans of the game franchise into a widely talked about marketing move.The video is talking with, not at, customers. And it's fun.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

A web site's ranking and user experience are affected by many things you may not know because they're beyond the HTML on the web pages themselves. They can help or hurt your search engine ranking and your user's experience.

Users scan more than read online, and they scan in an F-shaped pattern. This is a heat map of where readers' eyes look while reading online (red areas are most viewed areas, yellow next most, blue least most viewed; click image to enlarge):

Readers scan the first sentences of paragraphs to decide whether to read the rest of the paragraph or not. The first sentence should describe the paragraph, giving readers clues as to whether the rest of the paragraph will interest them. The first two words of each paragraph should be the most information-carrying words.

Even deeply interested and engaged visitors often do not read all of an article's text as the first 30 seconds of this video show:

Readers often read only the first 2 words of a paragraph (Jakob Nielsen's October 22, 2007 Alertbox) so the first two words should carry the meaning of, or abbreviate, the entire paragraph without compromising the writing. The first two words of a paragraph or description must be specific, clear and meaningful to a reader or searcher.

Using the best voice in first sentences and descriptions impacts two things:

how often people click on a given search engine result

how much of a paragraph the reader reads

Descriptions may be placed in the description meta tag and sometimes accompany non-text items (like video or audio content). They are often used by Google and other search engines as the snippets beneath page titles on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Descriptions benefit from either active voice or passive voice depending on specifics. These are examples of less than ideal use of voice:

Those don't help users, or search engines, understand the entire sentence; the first two words are not particularly information-carrying words. The first sentence is aimed a people interested in interest rates, not those interested in the broader topic of the Federal Reserve. The second likely interests those who want to know about Stary McFamous more than paparazzi in general.

Titles, headlines and subheadings all need the most meaningful and significant information first, toward the beginning. Many forms of content are often viewed out of context and in contexts outside the publisher's control:

titles

subject lines

headlines

Microcontent must have an even more exaggerated inverted pyramid style than the larger content they designate; the first word or two should be the most important and meaning imbued words in titles, headlines and subjects.

Users search for terms they already know more than new, made up words or jargon; If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site (Jakob Nielsen August 28, 2006 Alertbox). The keywords you are targeting on a given page should be words often searched by the people you want to have find that page, as Google advises in their guidelines. They should also be pleased to find the page after searching for those words; they should find what they wanted to find.

Targeted Keywords should organically end up in the text since they will be relevant to the text. While some recommend exact percentages of words on a page should be targeted keywords, this can result in very awkward, or transparently keyword-stuffed copy (like this, this, this and this).

The best thing to do, is put the primary keyword somewhere in the first paragraph or first sentence, which should be easy since the keyword is related to the text. If putting the primary keyword in the very start of the text would be repeating a word in the title too soon, and would not be good writing, a secondary keyword can be used near the start of the text. It can also help to put a primary or secondary keyword in the last paragraph or sentence.

SEO and accessibility benefit when the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations are clearly spelled out. Instead of leaving search engines to guess which meaning of an acronym you intend, tell them. Using HTML to identify acronyms and abbreviations makes pages more accessible to non-visual browsers as well.

Google indexes acronyms more effectively when they are marked-up properly; Some say they use the acronym tag ...frequently and I have a page that responds to a keyword that only appears in the title attribute.

Even more vital is identifying acronyms and abbreviations when they have many different meanings. For instance "NASA" is both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Auto Sport Association, or "LA" in the following:

I have a friend from New Orleans, LA who now lives in LA.

Which is marked-up with this syntax:

I have a friend from New Orleans, <abbr title="Louisiana">LA</abbr> who now lives in <acronym title="Los Angeles">LA</acronym>.

In all cases making the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations clear makes for clear online writing.

For numbers, use digits, not words, online. Users can more easily read and understand these:

24 Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome

There are 50 states in the United States.

On August 1, 2008 at 6:18:22 PM GMT the US national debt was about $9,535,720,238,424.97.

Than these:

Twenty-Four Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome

There are fifty states in the United States.

On August first two-thousand eight at six eighteen and twenty-two seconds in the evening, GMT the US national debt was about nine trillion, five hundred thirty five billion, seven hundred twenty million, two hundred thirty eight thousand, four hundred twenty-four dollars and ninety seven cents.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Web sites can use your ip address to determine your internet location and your location in the real world. They use geolocation to treat visitors from different places differently. For example, Google typically redirects users to the local version of their site, and modifies search results to try to provide more geographically relevant search results (see this in action).

Use a proxy to see what different visitors in different places see. For instance, if you visit spyber.com you will see where spyber.com's machines believe you are located. Also, hostip.info does this (as other sites do too). You can change your internet location, without physically moving or connecting to the internet differently. This is useful to test what a website will look like to visitors outside of your own country. To change your internet location, do this:

This article discusses how the second entry, without the off line brand name recognition, is catching up and poised to trounce the slower, traditional game folks. Something I fear many companies don't realize is that with Facebook applications, fitting the Facebook world and engaging the Facebook user successfully trumps other concerns. For example, being the only offering of a specific type is not that important.

In corporate-speak this would be user affinity, in person-speak this is users liking one more than the other, and therefore using it more, and choosing it more, and sharing it worth friends more. As theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh is said to have said, "match the show to the venue;" user experience and preference can make for an application's success or failure more than most other things.

Monday, August 4, 2008

The Case for Atom

Embracing Atom now gives you broad compatibility with any standards based system, and in the future should keep your feeds adaptable and compatible with future technologies and tools.

Feeds in the Atom Syndication Format (atom 1.0) will have the widest possible uses, compatibility and longevity of any current syndication feed format. Atom is already a widely supported syndication format, and in the future a full-fledged protocol, that is already in development, ...for using XML (Extensible Markup Language) and HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) to edit content... an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources belonging to periodically updated websites (from The Atom Publishing Protocol Memo).

Atom, not RSS

[Atom has] been through a standardization process organized by an international standards body and there is an RFC that describes exactly what an Atom feed is and how you should parse it.

RSS is only "standard" in the sense that there are lots of people using various flavors of XML that claim to be RSS. There isn't even agreement as to who "owns" RSS 2.0 - Dave says he does, and the RSS Working Group says they do. Now there are 2 versions of the same "standard" floating around